Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 43: THE WRONG WAY

The loose board was the way he had left it. The warmth was still coming off what was under it. Thirty feet of stone between the relic and the grate a thing had just come up. The thing had not come alone.

He did not sleep.

He sat against the bench leg with the kit packed and the ledger shut and ran the night back until it stopped giving him anything.

One thing had come up the grate. A second set of contacts had been behind it. His relic was above those tunnels.

Whatever was down there was operating under the building where he kept the one thing that could get him killed faster than anything Percival could file.

He went back down grate fourteen at the fourth bell, before the route.

That’s not the gutters. That’s the other thing. It’s at fourteen.

He went back down grate fourteen at the fourth bell, before the route.

He had not slept. He had sat against the bench leg with the kit packed and the ledger shut. He ran the night back until it stopped giving him anything. The thing had come up his grate. It had not come alone. The cold off the dark past the bars had not eased after the kill.

A man does not go down a sewer at night with one tool and two beasts and eight days left.

It was not night now. It was the grey before. That was the most a man like him got.

He thought about the route while he checked the wire and the tool and the spare reservoir.

The route was at the sixth bell. The route did not move. A clerk two streets over marked the column at the sixth bell and the column did not care that a thing had come up grate fourteen.

Absent was absent.

Absent on a Field Provision admit’s record eight days out from a Live Combat Assessment was a line Percival did not have to write himself. The depot wrote it for him.

Aiden had spent four years learning exactly how a depot line traveled and exactly who read it.

The grate is thirty feet from my door. The relic is under my floor. Whatever sent that thing up is still down there. I lose the route for this. But I don’t sleep above something I don’t understand.

Eight days. Spend one of them down a hole.

He went down the shaft hand under hand. The lamp went first on its chain. Miasma rode the shoulder. Nyx rode the other. It did not look at him. It did not look at the lamp. It looked down the run before they reached the run.

The body was gone.

He had put it down the channel that fed away from fourteen. Heavy going down. He had heard the water take it. The channel ran the way it always ran, low and slow. Where a dead thing the size of a Gnawer and a half should have caught on the iron or the silt, there was nothing on the iron and nothing in the silt but the drag.

The drag went the wrong way.

Water moved one direction in the run under fourteen. He had walked this channel four years. He knew the direction the way he knew the forty-one steps on Aldgate.

The mark in the silt went against it. Something had taken the body up the run.

He crouched and put the lamp low to the silt.

Not teeth. Not the gouge a feeding thing left. A drag. Wide. Even. The body had been gripped once and pulled. Whatever had the grip had not stopped to argue with the weight.

One pull. Clean in the silt as far as the lamp reached.

I put a boot on that thing to move it a foot. Something took it whole and didn’t slow down.

Miasma’s weight came forward on his shoulder.

Not the wall. Not the working pulse. The careful one. The slow even rhythm she had held at the table leg the morning the shell opened. The one her body found when a thing was wrong in a way no wall answered.

She held it and faced up the run, the way the drag went, and did not come off his shoulder. There was nothing in front of them yet to come off the shoulder for.

Nyx was already looking up the run.

It had been looking up the run since the shaft. He understood that now and had not then. The pup faced the dark the drag went into and its eyes did the thing they did at the corner of his room. Fixed. Total. Past the thing they were on. It did not move. It did not make the no-sound move. It stayed on the shoulder.

Both of them aimed up the same run. Neither of them telling me to go.

He went up the run.

He kept the lamp low and the tool out and his back near the wall, the way he had gone into the cache. The cache had been a thing he chose with three nights of plan behind it.

This was a thing he was walking into with no plan and the grey running out over his head. The channel narrowed past the first bend. The water thinned. The drag mark held in the silt the whole way. Even. Never catching.

The stonework changed at the third bend.

He knew the change. He had seen it under the Academy. Hand-cut. Tool marks at an angle the city’s masons did not cut anymore. Joints fitted with no mortar he could find with a thumbnail.

Pre-imperial, the report would have called it. If the report had ever come down this far. It had not. The report did not know this run forked.

It forked.

The channel he walked ran on, low and wet, the route channel, the one that fed back toward the depot side.

The drag did not stay in it. The drag went left, into a cut that was not a drainage cut. Dry. Squared. Older than the channel it opened off. The water had never run there. The body had been taken there.

Left is not the route. Left is the thing under the merchant quarter.

He stood at the fork and let the lamp sit on the squared stone and made himself think it through instead of walk it.

The cache had been off a run like this. A fork the report did not know. Old stone. He had gone into the cache and come out of it with a relic that killed anyone who touched it without the seals. That relic was under his floor right now. Up. Behind a loose board. A seven-day window he had stopped trusting.

Renn had told him the Witness confirmed bloodlines for a buyer fourteen years deep. Marsh had told him the Witness placed handlers under a dead man’s plate and the handlers died inside the window.

He was the fourth name.

The seven days Marsh warned him about had expired. The pattern said he should be dead. A beast still tried to kill him.

A thing comes up my grate. It doesn’t leave, which nothing has done in thirty days. I kill it in the open with the lamp on me. And then something drags it the wrong way, into old stone. The same kind of old stone the relic came out of. That is not a sewer doing what sewers do.

He did not have a conclusion. He had the shape of one. He left it where it was. Down here, alone, a conclusion that moved him deeper was a conclusion he did not get to trust yet.

He put the lamp into the cut.

The light went six feet and stopped against air that did not take it the way the channel air took it.

The cut breathed.

He felt it on the back of his hand. The way he had felt the chamber breathe. A pressure that was not wind. It had a weight in it. The weight sat on the skin and did not move.

Miasma’s careful rhythm broke.

She did not go to the wall. She did not go to the working pulse. She dropped under both, lower than he had seen. The green banking to almost nothing. Old-still. The stillness that was not readiness. The stillness of a thing that had recognized something.

She did that once. The relic. She did the relic’s rhythm before I knew the relic was a thing. She’s doing the recognizing one now.

Nyx came off his shoulder.

It did not go up the cut. It went to the mouth of the cut and stopped there, square in it, small and dark in the lamp it would not hold, facing in.

It put its forefeet on the dry squared stone of the threshold and held. The way Miasma had held at the table leg over the shell. A body across a line.

That’s the bar. She did that for the egg. It’s doing that now. For what. It walked through a breach wall and didn’t brace. It’s bracing at a hole in the dark.

He stood at the mouth of the cut.

One tool. A lamp the cut would not let past six feet. A beast gone old-still on his shoulder. A pup standing a line across a threshold something had dragged a body through.

The route bell rang above him, far up through the stone. The sixth. A clerk two streets over marking Lamplighter Vell absent on a page with eight days on it.

He did not go back up for the bell.

He put the lamp forward into the six feet it was allowed. The light caught the far edge of it. The place the cut opened out.

And on the squared stone at that edge, set down out of the drag line, deliberate, not dropped, was the dead thing’s head, facing the mouth of the cut, facing him, put there the way a man set a thing down where it would be found.

That was carried past where the dragging stopped and set down pointing out. Bodies don’t do that. The run doesn’t do that. Somebody did that. For me to find.

Behind it the cut opened into dark the lamp did not reach. Out of that dark, unhurried, came the sound of a single set of contacts on stone that knew it was being listened to.